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<p>Not at all. Your “mind state” isn’t genetic. It is largely determined by your environment. </p>
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<p>Short answer: hell no. Demographically, are these AA kids given the same culture and domestic stability as their white, Asian and Indian peers? Do they live in the same neighborhoods? If not, then they aren’t given the same chance to thrive. Poverty is only part of the problem. Those AA kids are far more likely to come from single parent homes, more likely to live in dangerous neighborhoods, more likely to have parents that are unable to help them with their homework, and less likely to have parents that are concerned with their education. </p>
<p>Read the above again. Are these AA kids given the same chance to thrive as their low-income white, Asian, and Indian peers?</p>
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<p>Near impossible. You really need to go to the ghetto to understand. There is no dearth of children whose first concerns iare finding food to eat and a place to feel safe every day of their lives. You think that it’s a matter of rising above very surmountable odds. But that’s only because, you’ve been taught how to get about in the real world in your idyllic little suburb. </p>
<p>A lot of these kids don’t have parents in the conventional sense. They have adults that turn on the TV and hope to god that their children don’t leave the house and cause trouble. They aren’t even taught traditional English. They aren’t even put in stimulating environments.</p>
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<p>You really have to stop putting up strawmen. I have never, at any point in this discussion, condoned criminality. I only express the variables and circumstances that produce it. </p>
<p>I think living in a home and being essentially left to raise yourself is a damned near impossible thing to do. The average person in that situation is going to look for the nearest person that provides them attention – often times their peers or someone slightly older – and emulate them. Often times the person that has the most time to do that are the worst influences – they usually don’t work and are more likely to sell drugs.</p>
<p>You really need to step outside of yourself. All the values you hold are there because SOMEONE ELSE INSTILLED THEM IN YOU. You did not develop them of your own volition. You are nothing more than the sum of your environment and response stimuli. Had no one ever taught you your manners you wouldn’t have them. Had you been beaten up for reading books and doing well in school you would have stopped doing so immediately. Had someone told you that selling drugs was the best way to make money and nothing in your environment led you to believe to the contrary, you would have considered it. Heavily.</p>
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<p>You’re impossible. What you’re essentially saying is that you’re better than every single one of those kids on the corner from your idyllic ‘semi-affluent suburb’. That’s easy to say, but hard to prove. You need to step outside of yourself. You were born on third base but you think you’ve hit a triple. And here you are trying to compare yourself to kids that weren’t even given a bat let alone shown to you use it.</p>